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1946 - Why I WriteWHY I WRITE (1946)From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when Igrew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen andtwenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with theconsciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner orlater I should have to settle down and write books.I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years oneither side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this andother reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeablemannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had thelonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations withimaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitionswere mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knewthat I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could getmy own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume ofserious--i.e. seriously intended--writing which I produced all throughmy childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrotemy first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down todictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about atiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth'--a good enough phrase, but Ifancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger'. At eleven,when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which wasprinted in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on thedeath of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrotebad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I alsoattempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the totalof the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during allthose years.However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literaryactivities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which Iproduced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart fromschool work, I wrote VERS D'OCCASION, semi-comic poems which I could turnout at what now seems to me astonishing speed--at fourteen I wrote awhole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week--andhelped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. Thesemagazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine,and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapestjournalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, Iwas carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this wasthe making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diaryexisting only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of childrenand adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say,Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, butquite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and becamemore and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things Isaw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through myhead: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam ofsunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table,where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right handin his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street atortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf', etc. etc. This habitcontinued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literaryyears. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, Iseemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, undera kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, havereflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages,but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptivePage 1
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1946 - Why I Writequality.When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words,i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,So hee with difficulty and labour hardMoved on: with difficulty and labour hee.which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down mybackbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As forthe need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clearwhat kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said towant to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalisticnovels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arrestingsimiles, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partlyfor the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel,BURMESE DAYS, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier,is rather that kind of book.I give all this background information because I do not think one canassess a writer's motives without knowing something of his earlydevelopment. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own--but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotionalattitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, nodoubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at someimmature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his earlyinfluences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Puttingaside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives forwriting, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degreesin every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary fromtime to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. Theyare:(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to beremembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbedyou in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not amotive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic withscientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successfulbusinessmen--in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The greatmass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of aboutthirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all--andlive chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. Butthere is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determinedto live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain andself-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world,or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure inthe impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or therhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels isvaluable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeblein a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks willhave pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarianreasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc.Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aestheticconsiderations.(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find outtrue facts and store them up for the use of posterity.Page 2
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1946 - Why I Write(iv) Political purpose.--Using the word 'political' in the widestpossible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alterother peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinionthat art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a politicalattitude.It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another,and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.By nature--taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained whenyou are first adult--I am a person in whom the first three motives wouldoutweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate ormerely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of mypolitical loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort ofpamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (theIndian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and thesense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and mademe for the first time fully aware of the existence of the workingclasses, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of thenature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give mean accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish CivilWar, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing mydilemma:A happy vicar I might have beenTwo hundred years agoTo preach upon eternal doomAnd watch my walnuts grow;But born, alas, in an evil time,I missed that pleasant haven,For the hair has grown on my upper lipAnd the clergy are all clean-shaven.And later still the times were good,We were so easy to please,We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleepOn the bosoms of the trees.All ignorant we dared to ownThe joys we now dissemble;The greenfinch on the apple boughCould make my enemies tremble.But girl's bellies and apricots,Roach in a shaded stream,Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,All these are a dream.It is forbidden to dream again;We maim our joys or hide them:Horses are made of chromium steelAnd little fat men shall ride them.I am the worm who never turned,The eunuch without a harem;Between the priest and the commissarI walk like Eugene Aram;And the commissar is telling my fortuneWhile the radio plays,But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,Page 3
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